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  ‘You forged his signature?’

  ‘That’s what orderly room corporals are for.’

  ‘You saved his career, dad.’

  ‘And he saved my ass a few times too, Billy. We made a good team.’

  ‘And what were those secret orders?’

  Stein laughed. ‘Secret orders from Army HQ. The war in Europe was in its final few hours. I was convinced it contained orders shipping us stateside and I wanted to be the first one to know.’ He leaned closer to his son. ‘I figured I might be able to get a couple of bets on before the official announcement was made.’ He laughed again. ‘So I was mighty disappointed when I read we were to supply transport for an escort detail. Just a milk run from Merkers to Frankfurt, I remember thinking at the time. Little did I realize that I was holding in my hand a piece of paper that would net me several million dollars.’

  The two men sat silent in the car for several minutes, then Stein said, ‘Just look at the time. We’d better get moving or I’ll miss the flight to Geneva and find myself changing planes in Paris or London or something.’

  ‘Take care of yourself, dad.’

  ‘You bet your ass I will, Billy,’ said Charles Stein.

  It was Friday, 25 May 1979.

  Chapter 7

  On that same Friday in London, Boyd Stuart and Jennifer had lunch at Les Arcades, a small brasserie in Belgravia. There was an auction at Sotheby’s across the street and the tables were crowded. Jennifer Ryden – as she now preferred to be known – wore a pale fur coat. Her eyes were bright, her lipstick perfect and her skin glowing with health. She was the same bright, beautiful girl that Boyd Stuart had fallen so madly in love with, but now he could see her with clearer vision.

  ‘Daddy has been quite wonderful!’

  ‘Sending me to California, you mean?’

  ‘Isn’t that supposed to be secret?’ she said. There was no mistaking the rebuke. She stabbed a small section of dry lettuce and put it into her tiny mouth. She never ate food that might dribble down her chin or drip on to her clothes. That was how she always managed to look so groomed and clean.

  ‘I have no secrets from you, Jennifer,’ said Boyd Stuart.

  She looked, up from her plate and smiled to acknowledge that her ex-husband had won the exchange. ‘You haven’t come across that inlaid snuff box, I suppose?’

  ‘I’m sure it’s not in the flat, Jenny.’

  ‘Nor the gold watch?’

  ‘No,’ said Stuart.

  ‘It’s inscribed “Elliot” … an old watch, a gold hunter.’

  ‘You’ve asked me a dozen times, Jenny. I’ve searched high and low for it.’ In response to Stuart’s signal the waiter served coffee.

  ‘I’ve brought a list,’ she said. She reached into her Hermès bag for a small leather pad and gold pencil. He had always dreaded those little lists which she presented to him. There were shopping lists and reading lists, appointment lists and, only too often, lists of jobs that others had to complete for her. ‘I found the photo of mummy in the silver frame,’ she said, carefully deleting that from the list of possessions before passing it to him. ‘Jennifer Ryden’ was engraved at the top of the sheet of watermarked paper and the handwriting was neat and orderly without errors. ‘It’s the gold watch that is most important,’ she added. ‘That detective story book is from the London Library; if we can’t find it, I shall simply have to pay them … Did you look in the tiny drawer in the dressing table, the one that sticks?’

  ‘I’ve told you, Jennifer, if you don’t believe I’m capable of finding these odds and ends, you can look around yourself. You still have your key.’

  She gave a theatrical shiver. ‘Seeing all the furniture and things would bring all the horrors back to me.’

  ‘You’ve taken most of the furniture,’ said Boyd Stuart, ‘and the bedroom and the hall have been redecorated.’

  ‘It was daddy’s watch. He’s so attached to it. I do wish you would have a proper look.’ She tipped her head to one side and gave him her most winsome smile.

  ‘Are you meeting someone?’

  She swung round to see out of the window. There was a spindly young fellow waiting outside. He looked like the sort of young man Jennifer had always had to carry parcels, hail taxis and hold umbrellas over her. His checked cap was pulled low over his eyebrows and he wore a regimental tie and a well-cut suit. He saw Jennifer getting to her feet and waved to her. She didn’t wave back. ‘Now don’t just say you’ll look for them,’ she said, touching the sheet of paper, ‘and please arrange for someone to forward my mail.’

  ‘Jennifer, darling,’ said Boyd Stuart, ‘divorcing you is going to make me the happiest man in the world.’

  ‘That’s loutish,’ said Jennifer Ryden, using one of her favourite terms of disapproval.

  ‘I am a lout,’ said Boyd Stuart. ‘I’ve always been a lout.’

  ‘Well, don’t be a lout about daddy’s gold watch,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll search for it,’ said Boyd Stuart.

  She looked at him as she drew the fur coat over her shoulders, and felt bound to offer an explanation. ‘It has sentimental value. Mummy and daddy are furious with me for losing it.’

  ‘Jennifer, you didn’t let yourself into the flat and force open that antique desk of mine, did you?’

  ‘Boyd! How could you suggest such a thing?’

  She glanced at herself in the mirror and touched her hair in a gesture which reminded Stuart of her father. She kissed him goodbye but, heedful of her lipstick, she did not allow their lips to touch. Boyd Stuart watched her as she walked out, saw the effect she had upon the eager young man awaiting her and recognized something of himself. He was still thinking of her when the waiter brought him the bill for lunch.

  Chapter 8

  Geneva was cloudy and cool when the jumbo jet brought Stein there on the afternoon of Saturday, 26 May 1979. Erich Loden, Colonel Pitman’s chauffeur, had been permitted to go through the customs and the underground tunnel to wait for Stein at the gate.

  ‘Your son phoned to say you were coming, Mr Stein. The colonel was resting but I was sure he’d want me to come out and meet you as I usually do. Two pieces of luggage, Mr Stein?’

  ‘Shiny aluminium.’ Stein handed him the baggage receipts. ‘I’ll step across to change some money at the bank counter, Erich. I’ll see you at the customs – green door. Where’s the car?’

  ‘Immediately outside – arrivals level.’

  Stein nodded. He laid ten 100-dollar notes on the counter and received in return a disappointingly small number of Swiss francs. Stein liked large-denomination money – it simplified his calculations and kept his silk-lined, crocodile-leather wallet from bulging too much.

  He followed the driver past the immigration desk and through the crush of people waiting outside the customs hall. There was the white Rolls-Royce, with Swiss registration plates, parked exactly outside the glass doors. The driver was holding the door for him.

  ‘A new one, Erich?’

  ‘We just had delivery, sir. The colonel has a new Rolls every five years. Always white, always the same tan upholstery, tinted windows, stereo hi-fi, FM radio and telephone. He still has the Jaguar, of course. He prefers that when he’s driving himself.’ Stein tapped the roof before getting in. ‘When is he going to change over to a Mercedes, Erich?’

  ‘The colonel would never buy a German car. You know that, Mr Stein. He sent the colour TV back to the shop when he discovered that parts of it were manufactured in Germany.’

  Stein laughed. He liked Erich Loden, who had been the colonel’s driver, servant and general factotum for over twenty years and remained devoted to him.

  Stein got into the back seat of the Rolls and twiddled with the knobs of the radio, but reception was blocked by the steel-framed airport buildings. He pulled a cassette from the box and plugged it into the player. The music of Django Reinhardt filled the car. He turned the volume down.

  The driver slid behind the wheel and started the
engine. ‘Any calls downtown, Mr Stein? You want me to go past the cake shop?’

  ‘Well,’ said Stein as if considering the suggestion for the first time, ‘why don’t I just stop by for a cup of coffee at Madame Mauring’s.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the driver. It was a joke that both men understood. Stein rarely took the trip from the airport to Colonel Pitman’s house without stopping at the well-known Mauring’s Tea Room & Confiserie near the cathedral.

  The decision made, Stein leant back and watched the world go by. The modern factories gave way to expensive apartment blocks and tidy lawns, then came the shopping streets, displays of carefully arranged cheeses and sausages, and the scaly glitter of wristwatches, swimming through the windows in endless shoals.

  Madame Mauring was an elderly woman with tight, permanently waved grey hair and a ruddy complexion. She made many of the cream cakes herself, as well as some marzipan slices of which Stein was especially fond.

  ‘I’ve brought you a present,’ said Stein, producing from his flight bag some perfume he had bought on the plane ‘For my favourite girlfriend. “Infini”.’

  ‘You are a nice man, Mr Stein,’ she said and gave him a swift decorous peck on the cheek. Stein smiled with pleasure. ‘And now I bring for you the new almond cake. It’s still warm but never mind, I will cut it.’ This was a considerable concession. Madame Mauring did not approve of any of her creations being sliced before they were quite cold.

  Stein sat down in the little tea room and looked round the bright wallpaper and the old-fashioned cast-iron tables with something of a personal pride. Charles Stein had financed Madame Mauring’s little business venture after tasting the cakes she supplied to a large restaurant on the Rue du Rhône. That was eighteen years ago, and last year he had allowed Madame Mauring to buy him out.

  ‘Next year, or the year after, I am giving the team room to my daughter. Her husband works at a good restaurant in Zurich. They will both come back here to live.’

  ‘That will be nice for you, Madame Mauring. But I can’t imagine this place without you. What about all your regular customers?’

  ‘I will keep my apartment upstairs,’ she said. ‘And your room, too – that will be untouched.’

  ‘Thank you, Madame Mauring. This is where we began, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She had heard many times the story of how the Americans had started their merchant bank in these rooms above a jewellery shop in the narrow street which wound uphill to the cathedral. Prosperous trading in the immediate post-war period had enabled them to move the bank to more appropriate premises facing the lake on the Quai des Bergues. Every nook and cranny of this place brought back memories to Stein. He had been back and forth across the Atlantic frequently in those days, learning quickly how deals were made in Switzerland, giving the colonel courage enough to fight the competition and calming down irate clients when things went wrong. Madame Mauring had always insisted that one room upstairs was his but Stein had almost forgotten the last time he had used it.

  ‘Take the rest of the almond cake with you,’ she said. ‘I have a box all ready.’ Stein did not resist the idea. He found it very reassuring to have some food with him, even in such a well-organized house as that of Colonel Pitman.

  ‘She’s a good woman,’ he told the driver as he settled back into the leather seat of the Rolls and brushed from his lips the last crumbs.

  ‘The colonel never goes there now,’ said the driver. ‘He says that the cakes and coffee are not good for his digestion. The “nut house” he calls it, did you know that?’

  Stein grunted. The truth was that Colonel Pitman was not interested in food. One look at him would tell you that: thin, finickety and abstemious. Most of the West Point officers seemed to be the same. The colonel was always boasting of how he could still fit into his wartime uniform. It was not an achievement by which Stein set large store.

  ‘There will be a traffic jam downtown. It’s rush hour and with the bottlenecks at the bridges there is just no way to avoid it.’

  The car was halted by traffic when the driver spoke again. ‘I wouldn’t want to step out of line, Mr Stein …’ he began hesitantly.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I thought you should know that the colonel takes a rest every afternoon. That’s why he didn’t come out to the airport. You may not see him until you go down for drinks.’

  ‘How long has this been?’

  ‘Some three weeks,’ said the driver. ‘The doctor brought a heart specialist from Lausanne and gave him a check-up last month. He told him he’s got to slow down.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘That didn’t go over well with the colonel, you can probably imagine what he said, but he took the advice just the same.’

  ‘He’s quite a man, the colonel,’ said Stein.

  ‘You’ve known him a long time, Mr Stein. It’s just wonderful the way all you men from the same battalion kept up your friendships and put together enough money to finance a business together. It was some idea, Mr Stein! A little private bank, here in Geneva. How did you think of it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Stein. ‘One of the boys suggested it in fun, and then we considered it seriously.’

  Stein remembered that night when they realized how much gold they had stolen. There were all sort of crackpot ideas about what to do with it. Burying it in the ground was the most popular suggestion, as he recalled. Only Stein came up with anything sophisticated: start a private bank. It was the one kind of business where the gross overprovision of capital would not be too conspicuous. Stein had little trouble getting the colonel to agree. Ever since that day when Lieutenant Pitman had arrived at battalion headquarters he had always looked to Stein for advice. But it was Colonel John Elroy Pitman the Third who had turned on enough charm to get a retired US army general and an impoverished English knight to take seats on the bank’s board. Thus equipped with names on the letterhead, the rest was relatively easy. The Swiss authorities had been very co-operative with British and US nationals in those days: they’d even opened up Swiss banks to Anglo-American teams searching for Nazi loot.

  ‘How long have you known the colonel, Mr Stein? If you don’t mind my asking.’

  ‘I first met the colonel in 1943,’ said Stein. ‘He was only a lieutenant in those days but he was the toughest son of a bitch in the regiment, I tell you. He took the regimental boxing championship in middleweight three times in a row. For a middleweight he was heavy, see. He was one hundred and fifty pounds and having trouble staying under the prescribed one hundred and sixty, on account of all the drinking he was doing in the officers’ club. Yes, quite a man.’

  ‘We never see any of his family over here,’ said the driver. He moved in his seat to see Charles Stein in the mirror and hesitated before saying, ‘It’s a shame the colonel never got married. He loves children, you know. He should have had a family of his own.’

  ‘The battalion was his family,’ said Stein. ‘He loved those men, Erich. For some of those dogfaces he was the only father they ever knew. Don’t get me wrong, now, there was nothing unnatural about it; the colonel just has a heart bigger than any man I ever knew.’

  The guitar music came to an end and Stein pushed the cassette back to repeat it. ‘How long since the colonel was stateside?’ Stein asked.

  ‘Not since he got out of the army.’

  ‘That would be about 1948,’ said Stein. ‘It’s a long time.’ He watched the scenery. The Alps loomed large above them by now, and lost in the mist and cloud there were the Juras on the far side of the lake. It was cold near the water without the sunshine. Such a place would not suit Charles Stein; he found the surrounding mountains oppressive and the inhabitants cold and formal. They were near to the French frontier here but there could be no mistaking the Swiss orderliness as they passed through villages where the dogs were securely chained and the logs sorted by size before being stacked outside the houses.

  The Rolls turned in as soon as the gates swung o
pen. The gravel crunched under the tyres and the Rolls moved slowly past the well-tended lawns and the summer house where Colonel Pitman sometimes took afternoon tea. The gravel drive ended in a circle round an ornate fountain. It provided an appropriate setting for the grand mansion that faced rolling lawns and shrubs as far as the trees that lined the lake shore. It was a sinister old place, thought Stein. The sort of large property that unscrupulous Geneva property salesmen are likely to say belonged once to Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward or the ex-Shah of Iran. On the steps there was a servant in a green baize apron ready to help the driver with the guest’s baggage.

  The house was a cheerless assembly of turrets and towers, looking like a scaled-down version of some neo-Gothic town hall. Inside, Stein’s footsteps clattered on the decorative stone. Even now, in May, it was chilly. The furniture was massive – shiny red mahogany sideboards and tall, glass-fronted cupboards filled with forgotten crockery. Four suits of armour were guarding the hallway, only the shine of their metal distinguishable in the gloom. On the hall table, under a large bowl of fresh flowers, were the day’s newspapers and some magazines and letters, all unopened and unexamined.

  A servant showed Stein up to a bedroom on the first floor. Alongside a big mahogany bed with a cream silk duvet cover there was an antique table with fresh fruit in a bowl and a coffee-table book on vintage cars. Over the bed hung a painting by some Dutch eighteenth-century artist: sepia sailing barges, sepia water, sepia sky. The servant opened the windows to reveal a wrought-iron balcony just large enough to permit the window shutters to fold back fully and provide a view of the garden and the lake, colourless in the grey afternoon light.